[gnaritas]

It's not an inability to understand you're seeing, it's a rejection of it because it misleads people. Pendants attack such language precisely because it's misleading without cause. There's no reason to personify random processes and doing so actively misleads people.

[baddox]

Where's your evidence that people are mislead? I don't have any data either, but I suspect exactly zero people came away thinking that bacteria have conscious desires, just like zero people believe that wind actually bites or people actually get butterflies in their stomach.

[gnaritas]

Yea, like zero people believe water has memory or zero people believe the earth is 6000 years old. Open your eyes, people believe shit they hear that's absurd constantly and in my anecdotal experience maybe 1 in 8 people I've met understood evolution. But maybe you don't live in a red state.

[enraged_camel]

There is no "active misleading." On the contrary, the usage of the word "desire" in this context aids layman understanding of the subject.

[gnaritas]

That's your opinion, not mine; however it's exactly talk like this that has led to most laymen not understanding evolution. They don't get that it's being dumbed down for them and that's not their fault, it's the fault of people who casually anthropomorphize things because they wrongly think it helps to clarify; it does not.

Understanding comes from truth, not casual simplifying lies.

[baddox]

You place a large hindrance on discussion if you require every discussion that mentions natural selection to give an entire introductory lesson on evolution. It's a ridiculous notion, especially when there is unlikely to be any misconceptions taken from this article. The purpose of the article was to explain why bacteria become resistant to antibiotics and how our use of antibiotics has led to this, and it does a fine job of that even if some uneducated people still can't describe the modern evolutnary synthesis.

[gnaritas]

I require no such thing, it is possible to have the same discussion without the unnecessary personification of bacterial wants. It adds nothing to the conversation to say bacteria wants rather than the fit survive.

[PeterisP]

Simplifying analogies often do help understanding new concepts, a big part of pedagogy theory is based on that.